Reading, observes Leah Price, is an “activity against which the social defines itself.” How odd then that, during the last sixty years or so, we have witnessed such a proliferation of social reading—in person, out loud, and in public. Literary readings, reader’s theater, chamber theater, docudrama, found-text performances, etc.—together they constitute a newly prominent genre I call “bookish performance.” Highbrow and low, avant-garde and mainstream, theatrical and extra-theatrical, these performances are nonetheless united by a shared aesthetic goal: not to dramatize literature, exactly, but to theatricalize the (inward) experience of reading. As such, they offer a thrillingly sensuous archive of our reading: its phenomenology, its ideology, and its sheer, idiosyncratic variety. They render palpable (and comparable) the subjectivity of our reading imaginations. They even allow various theories of reading to interact before our eyes.

If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'.

Recommend

Additional Information

ISSN

1080-661X

Print ISSN

0028-6087

Pages

pp. 567-589

Launched on MUSE

2016-12-22

Open Access

No

Project MUSE Mission

Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.